Weekend Butler: Are the Rich Really Different? John le Carré.

THE RICH REALLY ARE DIFFERENT
F. Scott Fitzgerald may have said: “The very rich are different from you and me.”

Ernest Hemingway may have replied: “Yes, they have more money.”.

I spent half a decade in close proximity to one of America’s richest women and her privileged friends, and in those long distant years, Hemingway’s alleged remark was smarter — the rich had money, and they also had all the human emotions and frailties.

Fitzgerald’s is now the wiser observation. The rich are different — that is, they’re no longer human as you and I define the term. Their wealth is vast. They exist in a bubble, so isolated by their vast wealth they are no longer participating in the give-and-take of ordinary life.

I’m thinking of Mark Zuckerberg here. It’s not his 1,400 acres and his 10 houses or even his $127 billion fortune. It’s Facebook. Not the online gathering place that oldsters like you and I frequent. I mean Facebook, the business.

From the Times:

For years, Facebook confronted crisis after crisis over privacy, misinformation and hate speech on its platform by publicly apologizing. Mr. Zuckerberg personally took responsibility for Russian interference on the siteduring the 2016 presidential election and has loudly stood up for free speech online. Facebook also promised transparency into the way that it operated.
But the drumbeat of criticism on issues as varied as racist speech and vaccine misinformation has not relented. Disgruntled Facebook employees have added to the furor by speaking out against their employer and leaking internal documents. Last week, The Wall Street Journal published articles based on such documents that showed Facebook knew about many of the harms it was causing.
So Facebook executives, concluding that their methods had done little to quell criticism or win supporters, decided early this year to go on the offensive, said six current and former employees, who declined to be identified for fear of reprisal.
Mr. Zuckerberg, who had become intertwined with policy issues including the 2020 election, also wanted to recast himself as an innovator, the people said. In January, the communications team circulated a document with a strategy for distancing Mr. Zuckerberg from scandals, partly by focusing his Facebook posts and media appearances on new products, they said.

An innovator, above the fray. Which means the dirty business of his business will be handled by minions. He won’t even be in the meetings. Watch Katie Porter grill JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon on one of his employee’s inability to live on her salary. He doesn’t know how the employee can solve her monthly budget shortfall. Trust me: he doesn’t care. Bezos? He cares about rockets. And on and on.

We all have stories of the “bad boss.” It’s hard not to connect the dots — the bosses are almost all men. Go further: why might that be? Yeah, the patrimony. But I’m thinking of something more basic: testosterone. As a friend says, “It’s more dangerous than opioids.”

WEEKEND THRILLER
As I write, the Republicans are threatening to blow up a routine deficit spending authorization, at a possible cost of $15 trillion and massive job losses. A good time to read John le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor, a novel that asks the question: Who’s more corrupt, a London banker or a Russian money-launderer?

Peregrine Makepiece — literally: a foreigner who makes peace — is vacationing on Antigua with Gail Perkins, his extremely attractive live-in girlfriend. Perry was, until recently, a tutor in English Literature at Oxford; Gail is a barrister with a future. She’s satisfied with the trajectory of her career; he’s so turned off by academia he wants to teach secondary school in some deprived English slum.

Perry plays a wickedly good game of tennis. The pro introduces him to Dima, “a muscular, stiff-backed, bald, brown-eyed Russian man of dignified bearing in his middle fifties.” Dima and Perry play three brisk sets. An invitation to a party follows. There, Perry and Gail note the presence of an entourage — and bodyguards.

Dima is fond of the young couple — or is it that the guy who describes himself “the world’s number one money
launderer” is just very good at sizing people up? Because Dima deputizes Gail and Perry. That is, he hands them a note…

SO VACCINES DON’T COME WITH A GUARANTEE? THINK BACK TO POLIO
Anti-vaxxers cheer every time a vaccinated person gets sick. That’s because they hold Big Pharma to an impossible standard. But only about this. Curious, isn’t it? A history lesson is in order.

In April 1955 more than 200 000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination program against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40 000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.

The author, reviewing failures in the manufacturing and inspection processes, exonerates Salk from blame and concludes that `the federal government, through its vaccine regulatory agency… was in the best position to avoid the Cutter tragedy’. Three larger companies produced safe polio vaccines according to Salk’s protocol for inactivating the virus with formaldehyde. The lack of experience and expertise at Cutter Laboratories, undetected by the inspectors, caused the disaster.

HEAD BUTLER FIELD TRIP
A few months ago, I was nuts for Jesse Malin’s “Todd Youth.” Watch/listen.

Malin has a new CD coming out. The first video is “State of the Art.” My favorite line so far: “I heard you called your sister from a holding cell.” Listen.

He’s off to Europe for a long tour, but there’s a New York show before he goes. October 23, at Brooklyn Made, a new club said to be good and safe. Will I see you there?

CAN YOU TOP THIS?
Michael Flynn, the former National Security Adviser to the Trump administration who has embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory and advocated the violent military overthrow of the United States, has a new conspiracy theory: the Deep State is going to vaccinate your salad dressing. Really. Click here.

Or is still even more insane:

Lead Florida GOP Senator, Manny Diaz calls for a review of all vaccine mandates, including polio, mumps, and rubella.

CONSOLATION: A BEDTIME SONG FOR CHILDREN OF ALL AGES
James Taylor & Carly Simon, “You Can Close Your Eyes.”